Storm Irene: Givenchy Spring 2010 Men´s.

Jamil

Michael Jackson found out about Riccardo Tisci through the pieces of Givenchy's womenswear he'd been wearing, and that's how Tisci came to be working on costumes for Jackson's engagement at the O2 Centre in London.

Armand O

The potential collaboration inspired the gold-star-studded pieces the designer showed in Givenchy’s new menswear collection.

He was due to meet his new client for the first time on Monday.

Keith Hernandez

Then Destiny intervened—meaning those pieces may eventually be Elvis-like holy relics.

Steffen Weng

But they were scarcely the high points in a presentation that saw Tisci finally coordinating ambition and reality.

Edward

Put simply, he loosened up—mostly.

After the show, the designer claimed his retail success with his leggings and Bermudas (the mosh-pit couture that defined his first two menswear collections for Givenchy) had given him the confidence to try something more elegant, hence the occasionally overwrought tailoring in the show, including trousers with a built-in cummerbund and a silk-lapelled suit.

Henry Watkins

But with Tisci insisting his theme was "Latino Boy Goes to Morocco" (his Latino boy is always going somewhere), the real heart of the collection was surely in the North African-inflected, layered activewear.

It gelled very effectively with the shorts-over-leggings silhouette he's been offering for the past two seasons (which seems to have been adopted for Spring 2010 by a flying wedge of his peers), and gave the clothes a ferociously sexy athleticism, helped along by a model casting that ranged far and wide across the globe.